 It is what they call the zeitgeber, the timekeeper, that maybe the sun and we are absolutely inextricably bonded. So what about the last idea we have about our thingness? It is our thoughts are our own. This is what we think is totally ourselves. And we think this, at least we did until the work of Giacomo Risalati. And as you saw through that video, Risalati was thunderstruck one day when doing his work with movie. He's a neuroscientist who is an expert in movement. And he was looking at this monkeys and he was testing the monkey to see which neuron fired when it reached for a peanut. And he found, as you saw on the movie, that the same neuron essentially fired when a researcher reached for a peanut as when the monkey did himself. So Risalati and his colleagues went on to study lots of other people, human beings, and they found that when we see a movement or we see an emotion, essentially the same neurons fire as if we were carrying out the movement, we were having that emotion. What does that mean, actually? First of all, it's a way for us to understand the world as the movie said, but it also means in a sense to make sense of the world, we have to actually merge with it. When we say, we say in the West, I feel your pain, bro. When we say I feel your pain, what we really mean is we actually do feel it because neurons fired, not the actual physical pain, but the emotional content of that pain, we feel ourselves. So nature has designed us to understand the world by bonding with it, by merging with it. So let's look at all of this stuff together. If there's no such thing really as things, if my biology is, Ben, yours is built from outside in by everything else outside of ourselves, finally determines the person we're going to be, if we can be influenced by a star hundreds of thousands of miles away, if my thoughts are not just mine, but a complex mix of everyone else's around me, as I do this, you're thinking that, you're feeling that, your neurons are firing as though you're doing that. If all of those things are happening to me, if I'm part of all of this, how can I say that this alone is me? Where can I say that I end and the rest of the world begin? Well, the point is I can't. I can only understand myself in relationship. I can only understand myself, and you can only understand yourself as part of a greater bond. So let's start looking at the whole idea of competition. We've looked at individualism. Let's look at competition because we've been told from the evolutionary biologists on Upward that we were born to compete. Even our genes were born to compete. But I've looked at all the science and I believe nature has not designed us to dominate. Nature has designed us to connect and we see that in so many aspects of our human behavior and what we've been hardwired to do. For instance, our need to what I call share, our need to belong. Now this is contrary to what we try to portray about ourselves in our popular culture. We like to do movies and books about the lone wolf hero, the guy with his or woman with his fist up against the establishment, whether he's Nicholas Cage or John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart or even Superman. The guy who stands up and is a lone individual and he's probably best epitomized by Gary Cooper in that old movie, The Fountainhead, which was based on the book by Ayn Rand. Anybody read that book? That was, this is the handbook for Western capitalism or at least it was. It's considered, you know, it's considered the beautiful sort of fictionalized encapsulation of Rand's objectivist philosophy. Now Howard Rourke, if you don't know the story, is an architect and he is a very uncompromising architect. He wants to build buildings his way. So he designs a public housing project as he's commissioned to do and the people who commission it decide to change it. So when it's finally built, the design is bastardized. This infuriates Rourke. So he actually blows it up and because he's a rugged individualist he decides during his trial, because he's of course arrested and put on trial, to defend himself and that gives Rand a chance for him to be a mouthpiece for her objectivist philosophy and so he stands up during his talk to the jury and he says, I do not owe one minute of my life to anyone else. That was my building. I chose to build it. I chose to destroy it. It is altruism that's killing us and so essentially her is the greed is good philosophy. She was greed is good before we ever heard of Wall Street and at the end of the movie and the book he gets acquitted despite blowing up a city block. He gets the girl and he gets to build buildings his way and he stands really at the end triumphant the Nietzschean superhero essentially the Ubermensch and he's also the perfect candidate for a heart attack. The evidence shows that when they look at heart attack victims they find that only half have the usual risk factors. You know, high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure. The rest, the other half are actually disconnected and lonely. Loneliness has been linked with so many things and so has the reverse. Now epidemiologists are really fascinated by the Japanese for instance because the Japanese smoke like chimneys but they don't get heart disease until they move to America in which case some of them do, lots of them do but some of them don't and so this fascinated a group of epidemiologists at Berkeley University and so they started University of California at Berkeley and so they started looking closer and they found this. They found that diet had nothing to do with it. Didn't matter if some of those people didn't get heart attacks, had tofu and sushi or Big Macs and fries. The only thing that mattered, the only thing that mattered is whether they recreated the close community ties that they'd had in Japan. In fact, they flew to Japan these scientists to try to find out what this amazing X factor was of impregnable good health and the Japanese just looked at them like they were crazy. They said, were you Americans? You're so lonely. You even walked down the street alone. Anybody can see this. Loneliness and loneliness has been the cause of all kinds of diseases and by the same token connecting is protective not only against heart disease but stroke the common cold. Suicides kill themselves because of what psychologists call excessive individuation. They feel left out. By the same token, joining, Harvard scientists have discovered if you join one group next year, bowling club, book club, church group, you have your chances of dying. It's that powerful. We have been programmed and hardwired to be together, to connect, not to be individuals. Second example that we need to connect is our need to agree with each other. We need to, I call it being aware. We need to agree and you see this. If you were filming, you're filming me but if I were filming you, you would see that you're actually nodding and blinking in time to my voice. There've been a lot of stop-action type studies of this and they've found people have an incredible need to imitate and that goes in offices, it goes in all kinds of aspects of life. Now, a woman called Segal Barsad discovered this. When she was working in her office, she's gone on to, she studies business behavior and what she calls the ripple effect because she found in her office one day which was a really miserable place to work. It was very testy and sullen and all of a sudden it wasn't like that. Everybody was suddenly chatting. People were standing around the coffee machine passing the time of day. She couldn't figure out what the difference was until all of a sudden it occurred to her that a grumpy coworker was on vacation and that wonderful atmosphere lasted all week until the coworker got back and then the whole mood descended again and she began to study emotional contagion and she found that it's true when someone, when you put a cuckoo in the nest, when you put somebody with a negative attitude in with a group of managers, they make bad decisions. They make worse decisions than when you put somebody positive in. Now, this not only happens to one person but it happens down a social network. So I'd like to show you a short movie to just illustrate this. In a girl's boarding school in Africa, three students suddenly started laughing uncontrollably. Six weeks later, more than half the school had been affected. The school was closed and pupils were sent home to their towns and villages. 10 days later, another curious thing happened. The laughter broke out again in a village over 55 miles away where some of the students lived. Hundreds more were affected. Other outbreaks started over a wide area until the epidemic peated out after six months. By then, over a thousand people had been affected though they all fully recovered. So why did it happen? Some villagers thought it was caused by radiation poisoning and doctors were called in to investigate. Their findings? Mass psychogenic illness. Emotions of all kinds can spread quickly. How you feel depends on how others feel. In fact, even a friend's friend's friend can affect you. We're biologically hardwired to mimic people around us. Probably a relic from the days when we needed to group together to ward off enemies or hunt for food. By copying others' outward behavior, we also adopt their inner emotions. Your friend feels happy, she smiles. So you smile and you feel happier. Positive emotions like this can feed an emotional stampede which can often last longer than a stampede of negative emotions. The laughter epidemic, just one way social networks have amazing power over us.